Reference: UNAIDS under fire for distortion, Bangkok Post, August 31, 2007

The structure, function, mission, and funding of organizations such as the UNAIDS, the UNDP, the WHO, the IPCC, and the World Bank offer perverse incentives. These organizations exist to defend humanity from specific threats. They are funded not according to their performance, but according to the degree of the threat. Therefore, it is not in their interest to actually achieve their goal. In fact, it is in their interest to exaggerate the degree of the threat and to claim that they are losing the war and that the degree of the threat is increasing and not decreasing over time. The money is in the losing. Victory is unthinkable for it would mean self annihilation since the reason for their existence would have been eliminated.

For example, the UNDP and the World Bank, organizations that have been fighting poverty for decades, report each year that they are failing, that the poverty problem has worsened, and that poverty is a bigger threat to humanity than previously thought. These assessments are used to justify continued and increased funding. If they actually achieved their stated goal of eradicating poverty they would have to dissolve themselves and voluntarily give up their very generous paychecks, perks, benefits, expense accounts, pension plans, and most of all their huge development budgets and incredible power over poor nations.

Yet another perverse incentive is that it is safer for these organizations to overestimate than to underestimate when making their projections for the future state of a threat to humanity. If the threat turns out to be bigger than the forecast, the organization may be accused of incompetence, malfeasance, or failure and heads may roll; but if it turns out to be less than forecast, there will be a general sense of relief and the exaggeration will be considered benign and soon forgotten. In fact, the organization may even step in and take some credit for saving mankind from the harsher than real forecast.

For example, the WHO's forecast of SARS and bird flu pandemics and the IPCC's forecast of a killer hurricane season for 2006 never materialized but these miscues have been mostly overlooked and even forgotten. Thus emboldened, the WHO is now forecasting that mankind will soon be set upon by heretofore unknown emerging diseases like Ebola just because we have gone long enough without one and so it is overdue. Likewise, the IPCC, with the 2006 hurricane season behind it, is now putting its chips on a killer hurricane season for 2007. If it happens they will win big. If it does not happen they won't lose. That's a pretty good deal for forecasters of doom.

Cha-am Jamal